Lovotics is a new field of research that seeks to explore and develop the possibilities of sexual and emotional relationships, and even love, between humans and robots. Soundwalk Collective interrogates the impulses, ideas, and needs underlying this research and ventures into a future where sex, intimacy, and desire are reformulated through the intertwined connection of humans, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
Human identity in an age of hybrid entanglement of the human and the machine requires and enables the construction of new forms of intimacy, gender, and sexuality. At present, however, we use such technologies primarily to produce programs of limited sexual iterations without questioning preformatted categories of gender and sexuality upheld in the interest of bio-political and economic appropriation. In contrast, Soundwalk Collective, together with actors Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, queer theorist Paul B. Preciado, and musicians Lyra Pramuk and Atom™, who contribute texts, sounds, and voices, ask whether the future of intimacy could rather be an exponentially expanding kaleidoscope of sexuality.
Throughout the piece, gender-blurring voices of various post-human entities allow a new language to emerge, which is generated by self-learning algorithms based on a database of excerpts from 20th century studies and literary texts on sexuality and gender.
This is the beginning of an organic journey of a complex and mutant project. »Lovotic« will take shape in its developed form of an audio-visual, expositive exhibition in Rome for the first time, in collaboration with FOROF.